The 1970 Vietnam Draft Lottery came up today in my Creative [View All]

writing class...

There was a poem in the anthology about the night the numbers were drawn from the perspective of college aged men and women...

It was gut wretching...

The poem hit me hard since I happen to be with several college aged camp counselors that night as they waited to see if their number came up...

I was only in seventh grade but knew a couple of kids from the high school where my mom taught who were already serving in Vietnam....

No one in the class, including the teacher, had any idea what I was talking about so I took about three or four minutes and explained why they had a lottery and why it was different from calling back the reservists to Iraq recently....

The class was stone silent...

About 15 kids and the teacher had no idea what a draft really was, why this night was different....

I told them a lot of privileged kids could get out of serving if they went to college, joined the national guard or became a police or fireman, to name a few...

I told them that on that night, the War became real to millions of kids who were either for the war or ambivilent about it....

That night, the cost of the war hit in all the living rooms of America, not just those in the country or the inner city...

I said perhaps Mr. Bush wouldn't be so cavalier with young American lives if his people, his class suddenly became part of everyday American life...

Then it would be back to being a democracy where everyone had a stake in what our leaders did...